Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Sapphire readies unlocked RX 460: Nitro 1024 SP edition

RX 460 may not be the fastest offering based on AMD’s
Polaris GPU but this graphics card is quickly becoming the darling of gaming
crowd. With a price tag of around 10K Indian Rupees for the 2GB version and 12K
for the 4GB ones, RX 460 can handle anything HD and scores some respectable FPS
even in FHD/1080p. In a land of budget constrained gamers with mostly 20”
1600x900 monitors, those are clear signs of a winner. But as it turns out,
there is more to little Baffin (code name of
RX 460) than eyes could see in the first glance. According to news from
WCCFTECH, Sapphire, one of the largest vendors of Radeon graphics cards, is
offering a special edition of the gpu with all 1024 SPs (Stream Processor) unlocked!
The standard variant of Rx 460, the one you’d normally find in the market,
features 896 SPs – so that’s an increment of 128 SPs. The card in question is
“Nitro - OC” branded – one of Sapphire’s elite performers and comes with
factory overclocked frequency of 1250 MHz out-of-the-box. All the other specifications
remain identical with no word on pricing.

RX 460 diagram - 2 CUs/128SP disbaled (click to enlarge)

The Radeon RX 460 is based on AMD’s latest Polaris 11 GPU
which comprises 2 Shader Engines holding a total of 14 CUs (Compute Units).
However, fully unlocked – the Polaris 11 silicon is capable of holding an array
of 16 CUs and this is where the extra stream processors come from. Since RX 460
works within a very low thermal footprint, AMD probably disabled those extra
SPs from efficiency concerns. There are already some sources with modified BIOS
which claim to have successfully unlocked the dormant cores. But flashing the
BIOS of a graphics card with unofficial firmwire is always a risky and
complicated business and we don’t recommend that. Sapphires offering however
can spare you all those troubles and let you enjoy the power of all 1024 SPs!

The 1024 SP Nitro - OC edition (click to enlarge)

The biggest question here is that how much of a difference
those extra shader cores make? If the benchmarks seen on WCCFTECH are to be
believed then we’re looking at an average ~5% FPS improvement. Nope, it wont make the
unplayable playable but we’re sure the extra processing power will come handy
especially on some shader heavy tittles. The potential caveats here could be availability
and pricing. We don’t know whether this “1024 SP” is going to be the norm or
remain something of a special edition in which case there isn’t much to be
excited about. From our experience these special variants are very region
specific and often subject to irregular availability. For example, the Nvidia’s
GTX 560 Ti 448 Core never made it to Indian market. From the writings on the
box of the product it seems like this one is reserved for Chinese market. It
also remains to be seen if other vendors such as Asus, MSI or XFX follow the
suite. As far as pricing goes, we believe a premium of 500-750 INR should be
fair one over standard variants.